It should take Superman to see inside Los Angeles City Hall

L.A. City Hall is the big pointy building in downtown Los Angeles and has appeared in countless movies and TV shows, none more famous than the original 1950s, “Adventures of Superman”, where it doubled as the home of Clark Kent’s employer, “The Daily Planet.”

This past holiday season City Hall was bathed in colorful lights giving it the appearance of a gigantic gift-wrapped Christmas present which it often is for the favored few.

While the exterior of City Hall is meant to be enjoyed by all, City Council President Herb Wesson wants to keep the inside a private affair.

So private, not even Clark Kent is welcome.

A small but hardy band of reporters from local TV, radio and newspapers, including this one, are fighting a Vladimir Putin-esque power-grab by Wesson and several of his yes men on the city council.

Under the fiction of “security concerns”, Wesson wants to limit access to the hallways around the council chambers to the very few reporters who have desks at City Hall itself.

By my count that’s four people.

If successful, Wesson will have replicated the “No Press Allowed” policy that has turned the State Capitol in Sacramento into a news free zone. Two things grow in the dark, mushrooms and corruption.

Funny, the City Council has no security concerns about all those lobbyists clogging the hallways.

If there’s one group in modern America held in even lower regard than politicians it’s those of us in the media. After watching CNN’s Don Lemmon last week actually ask former Inspector General with the Department of Transportation, Mary Schiavo, if Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 might have fallen into a “Black Hole” it’s hard to argue.

But this isn’t about making reporter’s jobs easier.

Herb Wesson’s attempt to limit access to city council members is a serious assault on accountability and transparency. The only thing transparent about it is the contempt Wesson has for the public’s right to know.

As it is our elected officials rarely answer direct questions with direct answers, deflecting most with a curt “no comment.”

The L.A. way is to retreat behind locked office doors and communicate via press release or social media postings, often nothing more than vacuous photos of ribbon-cutting ceremonies and other taxpayer subsidized propaganda.

The hallways behind council chambers are one of the few hot zones where reporters can actually buttonhole a councilman for comment on a story before they vanish behind the iron curtain at Spring Street, the place where the truth goes to die.

Advertisement

Here’s just one example:

On July 22, 2013, I was able to report in this column that KABC radio reporter Michael Linder tracked down city councilman Paul Koretz in a hallway behind chambers for his first and only public comment on his attempted giveaway of Fire Station 83 in Encino to an Armenian Cultural organization for one dollar a year for 50 years.

Had Linder not captured Koretz on tape promising a review of the deal, a valuable public asset would have been quietly dispatched with virtually no public input of any kind.

For the record, that deal is still pending.

The American system of government is adversarial by design. It is based on a system of checks and balances. A free and independent press is part of our system. It’s critical to good government. That Wesson and the other Sacramento imports now serving on the council want to replicate the restrictive and contemptuous limits on press access in Los Angeles is a disaster for openness in government.

Does the City of Bell ring a bell?

Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson should have the same access to City Hall as Clark Kent.

If Wesson gets his way, reporters and the public will need to develop Superman’s X-ray vision in order to see what their government is doing in their name and with their money.